Topic: Android

Apple's new HealthKit health and fitness tracking platform looks set to gain a fresh challenger in the form of Android developer Google, which will reportedly launch a similar service dubbed Google Fit at its annual developer conference in San Francisco later this month.

When recent reports suggested Apple was considering bringing iTunes to Android to help boost flagging music sales, skeptics scoffed at the thought of the iPhone maker supporting a competing platform. But with its $3 billion purchase of Beats, Apple has now revealed it plans to keep the Beats Music subscription apps alive not only on Google's Android, but also Microsoft's Windows Phone.

Just over 15 years ago, two Stanford University students set out to commercialize PageRank, a brilliant new search engine concept they'd developed to organize the Internet's vast array of information. However, the same intellectual property rights Google now opposes in regard to Android would have prevented Larry Page and Sergey Brin from ever having got their company off the ground back then.

Game Oven, the developer of Bounden, a novel dancing app making use of iPhone's gyroscope, has delayed its planned Android port after finding that even top tier devices using Google's platform have defective, inconsistent and in some cases completely faked gyroscope hardware.

Samsung lost an appeal in the Netherlands over its infringement of Apple's bounce-back patent, resulting in a broad injunction against selling accused devices and all other infringing devices that Samsung has introduced or will introduce.

Apple made legal progress in its battle with Samsung over patents in Japan this week when the Tokyo District Court ruled that Samsung had indeed illegally abused its Standards Essential Patents to demand a sales ban and excessive royalties against the iPhone maker.

After years of being embroiled in lawsuits, Apple and Google on Friday announced they would be dropping all actions related to smartphone technology. The peace treaty is mainly applicable to Google's Motorola subsidiary, with which Apple has been fighting in court since 2010.

After seeing the majority of its Java infringement claims against Android essentially set aside in 2012, Oracle has now won an important reversal on appeal that will allow it to pursue its $1 billion case against Google and potentially an injunction against Android as infringing its Java intellectual property.

Apple is widely expected to introduce new, larger iPhone 6 models this year, after ignoring the "phablet" market for years. Somewhat ironically, it was Apple that initiated and perpetuated the trend toward larger smartphones phones while its competitors, including Samsung, worked to popularize small devices in order to "exploit" consumer preferences for phones that weren't as "monstrously large" as the iPhone, as revealed in confidential documents from the patent infringement trial.

Following the jury's verdict in the second Apple vs Samsung trial, which found infringement in three of the five patents Apple argued, the company issued a statement thanking the jury and suggesting a continued fight to defend the company's innovative products.

The jurors deciding the outcome of the second Apple vs Samsung trial haven't yet returned a verdict, but their options are limited to a few possible outcomes, ranging from a fiery thermonuclear blast to a wintery new Dark Ages.

Though its total shipments fell year over year last quarter, Apple and its iPad still accounts for about a third of all tablets pushed to market last quarter, though research firm IDC has predicted overall tablet growth will be slow throughout 2014.

Last fall, Google's Motorola group unveiled its Moto X and Apple released its middle-tier iPhone 5c. Across the board, pundits and reporters portrayed the 5c as a grave mistake that got everything wrong while lavishing Google's Moto X with praise. Why were they so incredibly wrong?